What Strange Paradise

February 1, 2021

El Akkad follows up the sharply imagined second Civil War portrayed in American War with an investigation of the world refugee crisis. The only survivor of his ship's Mediterranean passage, a nine-year-old Syrian boy named Amir is rescued by a homeless girl native to the island where he has landed.

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May 24, 2021
Akkad (American War) delivers a stirring if straightforward account of a young boy’s flight from Syria during the country’s civil war. Amir Utu sets out for Egypt with his mother, uncle/stepfather Younis, and baby stepbrother. When Younis boards a ferryboat overloaded with migrants, Amir follows him and ends up on a disastrous journey across the Mediterranean, of which he is the sole survivor. The details of what went wrong emerge gradually: first, Amir flees from soldiers on an unnamed island’s beach. He is then found by disaffected 15-year-old Vänna Hermes, who helps him evade detention. Here, Akkad explores a world in which migrants routinely wash up dead on the beach and are viewed as an inconvenience for wealthy tourists. The chapters alternate between the “Before” and “After” of Amir’s arrival on the island, chronicling the characters and challenges Amir faces on the boat and on land, and depicting the injustice, intolerance, and violence that refugees face in a hostile global landscape. The result is a moving if somewhat predictable story of survival and the need for compassion and camaraderie across languages, cultures, religions, and borders. While readers may find themselves wishing for more complexity, there is plenty of moral clarity. Agent: Anne McDermid, CookeMcDermid.

June 1, 2021
A migrant boy finds an unexpected ally in his accidental voyage across the sea. In recent years, images of discarded life jackets piling up on the shores of Greek islands have shocked the world, as migrants from the Middle East pursue uncertain futures in Europe or elsewhere in the fabled "West." In this timely, captivating novel, El Akkad dramatizes the story of one such traveler: Amir Utu, a 9-year-old boy who unwittingly undertakes the turbulent journey. After accidentally boarding a repurposed fishing boat heading north from Alexandria, Amir must contend with punishing seas, unpredictable weather, exhausting hunger, and an eventual storm that leads to the overcrowded ship's capsizing. In chapters that alternate between Amir's harrowing, multiday voyage and his fortunate encounter with V�nna, a teenage islander, upon washing ashore, El Akkad pieces together the strands of Amir's story, past and present, as they lead up to and diverge from that fateful moment at sea. El Akkad's compelling, poetic prose captures the precarity and desperation of people pushed to the brink, and the wide-ranging dialogue levels frequently trenchant critiques (Americans are "comfortable with violence, not sex. Sometimes they just get the two confused") even as it produces a few admittedly didactic monologues (a smuggler lectures the migrants: "You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage"). This is an equally incisive, if more conventional, novel than the author's debut, American War (2017). A compassionate snapshot of one Syrian refugee's struggle to plot a course for home.

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January 7, 2022

Career journalist El Akkad burst onto the literary scene with 2017's American War, a work of near-future political dystopia told from the vantage of a second American civil war. This follow-up mines its material from a more immediate international bent, tracing the before and after, in bifurcated structure, of a Mediterranean migrant crossing from the perspective of a young Middle Eastern boy, Amir. In most ways, this second effort is a better fit for the author. His reportage background--so clinically used in his first effort--is more affectingly applied to the present-day ethnography here, creating a twofold tension-filled narrative of a boy's dangerous sea crossing and his subsequent ally-aided flight toward "freedom." At the novel's best, El Akkad uses this charged setup to interrogate Western-exceptionalist notions of globalist philosophy: At one point, a character casually announces, "The two kinds of people in this world aren't good and bad--they're engine and fuel." This intellectual potency doesn't always abide, as the author's would-be exploration of a Middle East diaspora regrettably falls prey to more rote character arcs, the good and bad guys all too easily explicated. VERDICT If El Akkad's vision isn't entirely fleshed out, this novel still marks a step forward, with his characters at least realized on a full emotional spectrum even if they remain largely prescribed archetypes.--Luke Gorham

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Starred review from June 1, 2021
Eight-year-old Amir Utu has recently moved to Egypt from war-torn Syria, after his family sold everything to gain passage. But when Amir's uncle mysteriously boards a ramshackle boat in the dark of night, the boy follows. He's bound for the Greek island of Kos, the only one in his boat who will survive the trip. And it's hardly paradise once he lands. A retired colonel, bent on chasing down refugees, sets his sights on poor Amir. Fortunately, the boy finds an ally in teen V�nna Hermes. Through another kind soul on the island, the kids now have a new mission: keep Amir safe for two days until he can get on a ferry to the mainland. El Akkad, author of the international best-seller, American War (2017), expertly contrasts the well-paced story of Amir's predicament with the ill-fated voyage that brought him to Greece. The ragtag bunch of strangers on the boat forms an incredibly well-drawn portrait of humanity as everyone bonds together initially, even with dollops of humor thrown in, but "somewhere along the journey they'd passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival." A suspenseful and heartbreaking painting of the refugee crisis as experienced by two children caught in the crosshairs.

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